[This post originally appeared at HBR on 3rd July 2012] Music publishers have long realized that consumers need help with finding new music. Radio played this role, and it was a source of revenue too. The placement of songs in movies and other media also fueled demand. The music video evolved from television shows to …
Facebook Credits and the Perils of Research on Digitisation
I never thought very much about Facebook Credits until an MBA project team decided to explore them more fully last year. The team tried hard but I really could not understand why Facebook wanted people to buy credits when they made purchases (of, say, virtual sheep) on Facebook. They explained that you could now earn …
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Snapguide and the content platform
A little while ago I wrote about the importance of content platforms: "Content platforms" are emerging that are designed to solve precisely this problem. A content platform is a standardized means of presenting information. Take, for instance, Yelp. If you want restaurant information, it gives you a list of possibilities with a ranking that can be …
TED becomes a publishing platform
The annual TED conference, held last weekend, used to be a small, exclusive, intimate affair in Monterey California. But it just moved to be a much larger event in Long Beach. It is pricey to attend and, no, I didn't actually do so. But TED's history tells us much about how publishing has changed. TED — that's …
The Range of Linus' Law
After more than a decade of successful growth, Wikipedia continues to defy easy characterization. It receives more than 400 million viewers per month. Close to four million articles grace its web pages in English alone. Volunteers built the entire corpus of text. This experience suggests that Wikipedia has done something right, but begs the question: …
A quick feed on the Facebook IPO
Facebook's user base is huge (845 million) but its growth rate is slowing. The main opportunities for growth appear to be in Asia. Facebook make most of their revenue from advertising (87%) and the rest from payments for app use. As a result, last year they made $1 billion. Zygna earn revenues 25% of Facebook's …
Elsevier's economic case is lacking
The proposed US Research Works Act (RWA) proposes to prohibit government funding agencies, such as the NIH, from doing things like its open access policy (enacted in 2005) requiring all publications from funded research to be placed in National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central database within 12 months of publication. Not surprisingly, some publishers, notably for-profit publishers, are supporting the …
Taking the text out of textbooks
I've been on both sides of the textbook market. I've read them and I've written them. And at each point I have had to struggle to see where they come in the learning experience. And by stuggle I mean it was not obvious that one textbook fit all. They have worked well for students who …
A few updates …
Just thought I'd list a few updates to some issues that I have previously blogged about: What problem does Google+ solve? I have previously written that I was not sure what problem Google+ was solving for consumers that made it distinctive from Facebook. Today, Google revealed more by introducing social elements into search results. Basically, …
Novices make Wikipedia tick
Wikipedia's success and even existence is a mystery. Social scientists (not just economists) do not understand how it could be that a completely open access encyclopedia could have worked. The traditional theory was that contributors who invested to make Wikipedia good would be subject to free riding and that any rewards they received would be …
Digitopoly 